Fingernails black with soil

Last weekend I spent half a day clearing out old growth and weeds and grass overtaking my little garden beds. It felt right that when the sun was shining and warm, after quite a bit of rain, that I pull and dig and carry countless armfuls of bracken from the beds. That I pull off old dead growth from the butterfly bushes and cut them back. I cut off and pulled invasive wolf grapevines that choke the trees they grow on. I refilled the bird feeders and replaced the suet. I made sure the bird bath was clean and full.

I then cleared the dead tomato plants from the other bed, ripping out more grapevines, giving the surviving tomatoes a lift into the air off the ground so they could continue growing, tying them gently with cotton string to give them room to grow.

Nothing told me it was time. I’d forgotten when spring comes, when green things shoot forth here. It just felt right to be in the sun, fingernails black with soil and broken, heart full of soul even broken too.

A year ago today I got back from Idaho. I’d traveled six thousand miles in four months, 3/4 of them alone with my cat in a little hatchback car. A year ago today I became a monster because I left my Stardust my life behind. For good.

And she fills my days still. I hear her voice and see the shape of her as she moves, just outside of my vision, disappearing when turn to see her.

She fills them less now. Every day a little less. In a few years I may have left her behind but she still sits with me.

I left her, yes. But it wasn’t because I didn’t love her. I will always love her, even when I’ve forgotten the smell of her and she is a sweetened sad memory. Some day she will no longer be the sandstorm of pain she is now.

Today wasn’t about her though. Today in the warm sunshine I went outside to gather wild grape vines to weave a cross for Brigid. The wolf moon is waning above and the winds are chilly but the sun shone so brightly the air was almost in the 80s and it was brilliant and crisp and smelled like spring growth.

As I sat barefoot on the cold ground and twisted the vines I focused on stories I remembered about sweet grass and the reciprocity of nature. How our Mother is always giving back when all us humans remember how to do is take. I wound the vines together and thought of the deep nests of eagles and how lichen and fungi work hand-in-hand, how if we take care of a plant it stays with us.

How balance must rule us all, and we must give before we can take. But people have forgotten this. They buy their groceries and have them delivered, not thinking twice of who brought it, who harvested the fruit, who planted the seed first to grow it, and all the hands that have touched it to get it to them.

Click a button on your phone and you don’t have to think of that. Go back into your McMansion, close your door, and continue to separate yourself from the circle of life all of us are a part of whether we like it or not. Even in death humans separate themselves with caskets and chemicals, so the earth can’t recognize them when they go back to Her.

Brigid’s cross is hanging at my door to welcome her back again, bringer of the light.

Today as I wove the cross I soaked in the warm sun and cut myself on the edges of the vines, until my fingers were sore and sticky with the sap. Out of a chaotic bundle tied in the right way and interwoven came a cross and I clipped the ends to make it uniform. The bits I tossed back into the high grass and said thank you to them for helping me create something so pretty. They will come back with the spring, they’re incorrigible.

I wasn’t done in the sun yet and thought of the garden beds I’d cleared the week before. I needed to plant and I wouldn’t be able to rest tonight if I didn’t listen.

I wandered the nursery at the hardware store and asked the plants which would like to come home with me. A few caught my eye and made it into the basket. When I got home I talked to them as I filled planters with rocks for drainage then a mixture of soil that was damp and smelled deeply of spring.

My fingernails broke, I ended up bleeding more than once, but I planted scads of lettuce, chard, peppers, and tomatoes. I cut lengths of bamboo I’d harvested earlier last year from a nice person who had them growing wild by the road. They were pared down to four and six foot lengths and driven into the ground to create tomato cages. I talked to each seedling as I told them how happy I was they were here now and how I’d take excellent care of them and look forward to getting to know them better.

I planted potted herbs into the ground that I’d harvested and propagated from my mom’s garden last year when I saw them last. They deserve a place here too. Rosemary, mint, oregano, catnip, chives, all went into the earth and were freed from the pots that had protected them as they grew roots.

As I removed each seedling and each herb from the pots that protected them I was removing myself from the protection I’ve wound around my energy for the past year. This pandemic has isolated me so that I could grow stronger, having been cut from the life I was building with my Stardust. I cut myself from her tree and the roots I was beginning to grow with her family. I was a cut branch with no roots, placed into soil alone to try to grow.

But it starts in stages of course. You don’t take a cutting from a plant and stick it into the soil and expect it to grow.

You isolate it and give it water, sunshine, and some nutrients, when it needs them. It wilts at first in shock. And you think all hope is lost.

But look. A new growth where the leaves fell off and are forgotten, a bud small and green and delicate. And smallest fibers of root hair have begun to emerge from the cut, the most traumatic part of her removal. See, that can reform too.

And there she needs to remain, for a while. A pandemic. Isolated, with everything that she needs to grow, and time. A lot of time. You forget about her and go about your days, trusting that she has the strength to keep growing. You go back to look one day a few weeks later and she is an explosion of life and silky roots and fresh green leaves and new small tentative branches of her own, that weren’t there before.

She can grow more, she’s stronger now, you can see it. You place her gently into soil, around her ball of roots growing from a place once attached to a tree and she’s a small tree of her own now, growing in ways the original never dreamed possible. And she stays there even longer than the first time and her growth is only half visible because now some is under the ground and not in water, she’s her own sapling at last.

She’s getting taller and stronger but still needs to be isolated and alone because the pandemic still rages and if I let her sit with the other plants she won’t get as much sun and water and air and she’s not strong enough yet.

And a year passes. She’s grown.

So today when I took those little cuttings I’d taken from my mother’s garden and remembered how small and delicate they were and how they almost didn’t survive but I let them grow at their own pace and slowly gave them more space to grow and more soil and roots of their own growing from the wounds I put in them I cried.

They had grown so many roots in the soil below them they’d become a little root-bound and they were so very ready to be planted into the ground. I tipped them out of their planters and into my palm and could see how much they’d grown. I loosened their roots with my fingertips and placed them gently into their holes in the ground and told them it’s time to grow even more now. That they have all the room in the world now, and I realized I do too.

Rooted where I choose, my tendrils reach into the entire planet and I have all the room I need to keep growing. It was a delicate process and a long one to get here, and a lot was lost along the way. But the growth I didn’t expect…it flabbergasts me.

And now I have all the room in the world to keep going.